This was discussed in lkml a few days ago. A hardware company is considering building an open fpga based video card. Although the target is mainly 2d accel its a good start. There was a lot of discussion about off screen rendering and support for the new compositing model in xorg. You can see that thread posted on kerneltrap.
I was aware of that. However, the proposition was by a company that is known for its 2d video cards (used for air control for example), so I was
talking something a bit different - just have a DSP add-on board powerful enough to do decent 3d.
Programming DSP is a lot easier than FPGA, the code is more portable, and,
besides, there are no FPGAs at the moment that can possibly compete with ASICs that are produced by ATI or NVidia. On the other hand with the movement to programmable everything conventional GPUs are slowly turning into DSPs. It may very well be that a conventional DSP will provide similar perfomance as long as we are using all the whiz-bang features.
(as opposed to using as few features as possible - which regular ASICs should still do much better than anything else).
best
Vladimir Dergachev
I see. Thats a good idea too. We just have to look for a company willing to do that. I have long been convinced that designing the hardware like this is the only way to go.
Just for fun here are some numbers:
Card BandWidth FillRate Triangles Ops budget for 1GFLOP DSP
GB/s Gpixel/s Mtriangle/s ops/pixel
Radeon 7500 5.3 0.5 62.5 2
Radeon 9000 Pro 16 1.0 62.5 1
Radeon X800 XT 18.4 8.3 520.0 0.12Note that 1 GFLOP DSP is like Pentium III-1000mhz.. Not quite, but similar.
The technology is getting there (for example 14.4 GFLOP board from bittware: http://www.bittware.com/products/PCI/t2pc/t2pc_desc.stm ) but they don't even quote price for such things.
best
Vladimir Dergachev
-- Blood is thicker then water... And much tastier John Davidorff Pell
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